Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall, installation view, 2015thanks-to-apple-amazon-and-the-mall-2242

Press Release

In our current state of digital media, telecommunications are ubiquitous and communications take place through screens, circumventing the tactile properties of the physical world. Words become one of the primary modes of conveying emotion, and language itself now functions as an artistic medium in the digital realm. In 2013 Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery began publishing artists’ ebooks in a series edited by Brian Droitcour, with the goal of shaping the user experience of the artist book into a time based medium.

Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall, curated in tandem with Droitcour, attempts to address some of the themes that many of the artists threaded through the ebooks; how technology distributes feelings, emotions, and embodied experiences, manifesting a fantasy version of humanity and leaving behind the constraints of biology. Artists explore grossly distorted versions of both the human form and evolving digital visual systems, amplifying urges in surprising and strange ways.

These themes will be presented in the physical gallery space in a variety of mediums, drawing a parallel between online stores such as iTunes and Amazon with the gallery’s white cube, whose crisp linearity echoes another achievement of 20th century architecture, the mall. These spaces, physical and digital, homogenize our encounters with objects/products/content. The show also hints at the social forms that emerge in these commercial spaces, which are formalized by power structures yet still hold potential for spontaneity, conflict, failure, and decay.

The title of the show comes out of a credit line in Isaac Richard Pool’s ebook Alien She, and points to the project’s dependence on corporations to sell and distribute the work.